Prologue

A scarlet stream pours down my upraised arm— fingertip to elbow—drizzling from laid-bare bone, falling in the longest moment of my lifetime onto shattered glass that once protected the Moonrise.

Mother’s red leather journals erupt in a fury of flame and fall to ash, her treasures vaporized, and the old stories move before my eyes in a dimension unimaginable to the living human mind—so crisp, so real—in colors that could never exist—with such clarity, as they snap into place on the reel of film that was my life.

Watching a random droplet disintegrate into a thousand beads of crimson mist as it splatters onto the great dark blotch growing at my feet—taking my last breath while a blistering cauldron of chrome-yellow gas fills my chest—I’m astonished at what I recall—Mother’s diaries and one enchanting day on a mountain in Japan—such an odd collection of minutiae—but I don’t know why.

Chapter One

Moonrise

1966 January 26

Ansel Adams never went to Fushimi Inari Taisha. If he had, he would have forsaken that black and white film and stayed with color.

Moon rises over

Dark desert as thick white clouds

Glow against black sky

Life staying in the shadows

Death hiding in the crosses

Yes, for this one aspect of the moon, high contrast was fine, but at Inari-yama—oh no—black and white would never do. God’s secrets are revealed in the color there—in the cavern of red torii, the depths of green cedar forest, the golden wish-fulfilling jewel—in such magnificence only a fool could not see His message.

*****

More than thirty-five years later, standing here at Fushimi Inari Grand Shrine, inside the tunnel of ten thousand torii with my mother’s journal in hand, I can see the colors, and they are even more amazing than her words described.

The texture of layered shades of brilliant lacquered red and fading persimmon streaked with sunset lavender. A golden glow from sunlight filtering between thick evergreen branches, its radiance stark against dark forest shadows. The dichotomy of permanence and transience stretched over the convex form of Japanese cedar columns.

A wide black band grounds each of the twenty thousand columns and contrasts sharply with the light gray hewn stone stairs and paths ascending the mountain. The potency of color and architecture make me feel as though I’m standing inside my own veins, looking at my very own life essence flowing with the rhythm of the great ribbed walls surrounding me.

Mother loved this place and leaving it must have been unbearable for her.

In the weeks before my trip to Japan, in this first real year of the new millennium, I read through the entirety of those two red leather books. Using clipped streamers of sunshine yellow Post-It notes, I marked the passages that held particular significance to me. Some bore her uniquely wise observations. Some resurrected nearly forgotten memories of my childhood and triggered long introspective episodes. Some illuminated the enigma that was our life.

*****

I remembered the day we first saw Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941 by Ansel Adams. We went into midtown Detroit to pick up supplies for Mother’s flagging wedding photography business.

There weren’t so many weddings anymore. In the twenty years since the end of World War Two and more than twelve years since the Korean cease-fire, the returning servicemen had all married. Now they had babies and children who had their pictures taken at school. The oldest of these children, those born in 1947 as the first fruits of peacetime, were going to college and staying single. Our near-in subdivision, not even twenty years old, was aging badly, with its quickly built cracker-box wood frame houses designed for fast sales to newly married ex-GIs. People with money were beginning to leave the adjacent areas for newer suburbs where they said the schools were better and the air was cleaner. Real estate investors, looking for cheap rental properties, were buying up houses in nearby neighborhoods and slowly depleting Mother’s small client base of networked friends and church members.

The shop that carried the heavy white leather albums with elegant shiny brass corners on every page, the type that Mother preferred, was a multi-faceted well-established business just north of Detroit’s midtown arts district on Woodward Avenue. It sold high-end cameras like Hasselblad, Mamiya, Nikon, and Zeiss Contax, with a myriad of lenses to fit either bayonet or screw mount attachments. It sold black and white 32 ASA film and print paper for aficionados who mixed their own chemicals and printed only full frame. Kodachrome color slide film for young fathers who planned vacations designed to produce fabulous Saturday-night slide shows for the neighbors. Cheap Kodak Fiesta cameras to teenage first–time users. The newest little Polaroid Swinger to mothers who wanted to snap quick shots of babies in bathtubs and first steps. It sold Hasselblad medium-format cameras with bellows and monorail and wholesale supplies to professional photographers with small businesses who still clung to the hope of making it big.
 

And it had a gallery that specialized in photography as art, in a room in the back. Most of the mothers with babies and fathers with big plans strolled past this section of the store, but the pros and aficionados always stopped and looked at the changing display. On that particular day, the owner, Mr. Kotsin, had chosen to display his own private collection of other photographers’ work, and among them was the Moonrise.

Of course, Mother stopped to look. She always did when we made this monthly trip on Wednesday after school. She would look and study, then sigh. Sometimes she would point to something and tell me why it was especially good or particularly bad.

“This Ansel Adams got it right, Jasmine. Do you see the delicate gray buildings with the stark white crosses? They’re so perfect, and yet . . . so imperfect,” she remarked that day, with a note of ecstasy in her voice, in her enthusiasm, as she studied the forms and the light.

“Do you see the massive church walls here on the left balanced by the weight of the mountains on the right? And the moon, so near the center and yet, just off, just a little, struggling as we all do, and the triangle it creates with the negative space between itself and the clouds.”

She paused.

“Think about it—to make this picture, his back was to the west. Behind him, on the opposite horizon, brilliantly hidden from view, was a round red globe—the setting sun—reflected by this eastern moon.”

Lingering, sighing, she whispered, “Ah—he was at the in-betweenness—the liminality.”

She paused again and stared. “Oh, those clouds. The force of those clouds. White so strong it magnifies this huge black sky. The ephemeral clouds and never-ending sky, like life and death, revolving around the elusive moon and illuminating sun.”

Her voice hushed to a whisper, and I barely heard her.

“So yin with only a subtle hint of the yang. So Shinto—like Izanagi and Izanami.”

I tugged at the sleeve on her brown, heavy wool winter coat and broke the spell.

“Mom, come on Mom. I like it too, but we have to catch the bus soon. Remember, Dad said to get home before dark. He said it’s not safe in midtown anymore.” My father’s voice intruded so very often, out of nowhere, into both our minds and thoughts. His fear became ours in a way we never understood. “It’s winter. The light is short in the winter. Come on Mom. We don’t have the car today, remember?”

Dad came home from the chemical plant a little late that night, with dust thick on his blue and white pinstriped Dickies coveralls, powder caked in the strands of curly dark reddish hair that stuck to his sweating forehead where the cap didn’t cover.

“I’m home,” he called into the house from the mudroom. “Damn conveyor belt broke, and the whole crew had to pitch in and clean it up.”

Normally he would remove the coveralls, put them into the woven willow basket, and emerge wearing a plaid flannel shirt and gray trousers. That night he decided he needed a bath before dinner.

“That crap they spilt stunk like shit, and I was crawlin’ around in it half the damn day. Crawlin’ under the doggone conveyor belt. Nasty place. Just nasty.”

He crossed the house wearing an old indigo blue cotton yukata, a kimono style bathrobe hand sewn by Mother years earlier when he was amenable to such things. His gait seemed slower than usual. He was short by American standards, and that night he seemed diminished as he rubbed the back of his neck, and deep lines spread across his face. He went to bathe in the old-fashioned white and black cast iron tub, its claw and ball feet recalling a time when eagle’s talons grasping a globe seemed both inevitable and right.

Mother cooked while he bathed, and eventually we all sat down to eat dinner. She had prepared pork chops, crisp and sizzling near-black on the outside but still tender and juicy on the inside, with thick brown gravy over a pyramid of heavy mashed potatoes, and fresh snapped young green beans. He was already slicing into the chop when Mother spoke.

“Jasmine and I went into midtown today to pick up the album for the Murphy wedding.” I saw her look at him, but he did not respond. He was hungry and focused on the plate. “Mr. Kotsin—you’ve met him—had a display of his personal collection of photographs. It was very nice, wasn’t it dear?’

“Yes, Mother, I liked it too. Especially that one with the moon.” It was the only one she had made me notice, and I knew she loved it. Unwittingly, I reflected her tastes and her desire, like a full moon rising dimly reflects a setting sun.

“Oh, it was wonderful. The composition was delightful.” She looked up at my dad again, hoping to share her extraordinary vision with him, but he kept eating in distant silence. “The black and the white balanced each other, just so, Jasper.”

He raised his eyes, squinting thinly with a deep furrow between them.

“Black and white? What about black and white? Dammit, that’s all I hear at the plant. ‘Those blacks did this,’ or ‘Them niggers did that.’” His voice grew louder and more distressed. “Now there’s a rumor the plant might close if we have riots here like they did in Watts last summer. Fuck, we might have to move. I don’t know where we’d go. And this neighborhood! This house probably ain’t worth half what we paid for it.” His voice ached with the unknown, the unpredictable. “I’m thirty-seven years old and I shouldn’t have to start over again just ‘cause they. . .”

When his native temper flared, he seemed enlarged, as if a beast writhed to escape. He stopped when he saw that Mother had gone pale. She detested any kind of confrontation. Words like this were horrendous to her damaged soul.

“I’m sorry. So sorry,” she mumbled in her polite tiny voice, her head bowed as she reverted to her traditional Japanese upbringing and formal miko training. I knew that in her heart she was only sorry she had said anything at all, and even at twelve years old, I knew that things had not been right between them for a very long time.

Dad finished his plate quietly and then arose. He stood behind Mother’s golden oak chair and touched the thick black hair falling across her hunched shoulders.

“I know you cain’t stand it when I get loud.” He was not adept with words of sentiment.

“You could make rice tomorrow night. We ain’t had it in a long time.” He had declared many times that he detested the bland flavor and boring texture of rice and now awkwardly offered this small gesture of reconciliation. I knew it was the best he could do.

*****

When I first read Mother’s words about Moonrise I was a bit surprised. I remembered her eloquent speech at the camera shop gallery and thought it would be there, in the diary, perhaps with more elaboration or at least the obvious passion she felt for this quintessential American icon. Instead, she painted it in Spartan sumi-e strokes of classical Japanese tanka poetry and spoke more deeply of Inari. She compared Moonrise, the great American photo, to Fushimi Inari, the great Japanese sacred place, in much the same way she had compared the sky and the clouds, as if there was some kind of balancing act going on—something liminal—forever separating the stark black and white from the dazzling color, but forever adjoining them as well.

Being in this place, Fushimi Inari, now I understand.

*****

Mother had begun her wedding photography business by accident. Whenever she told the story, she would first remind me that she and my father had not always lived in Detroit. They moved there late in 1952 because Father found a job at the chemical plant. They had come together and rented a little flat and spent their first Christmas there.

If I asked what came before, she would wave her hand aflutter and say, “That doesn’t matter now. It was long ago, many years before you were born.”

Then she would laugh and tell the same silly story of my blue baby bonnet and how strangers thought I must be a boy, and she never quite understood why, until my dad explained that the hat should be pink.

“Pink for girls, blue for boys. In Kyoto—when I lived there so long ago—we never heard of such things. Now, red—ah—that would have been a perfect color for such a vibrant child, but nowhere in America did they sell red clothes for babies. So sad,” she would say with a big mocking frown.

I would laugh because little children love to hear the same story again and again. Then she would pick up a big-print children’s book and recite the words from memory as we looked at the pictures, her finger following the text.

“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” And we would touch our noses together and laugh, she with her wide white teeth and me with black spaces awaiting new growth. I didn’t know it then, but that was how she improved her own reading skills in English, quickly moving from “Chicken Little” to Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass to Michener’s Sayonara, as I grew from toddler to teenager.

“Your father said we must join a church. His family had raised him so. He found this Baptist church near the city limits where the bus turned around, so we could get there, and that’s where we went.” Her recitation was almost always the same, but over time and many tellings, details emerged and came together to form a more complete picture.

“One day the preacher announced that someone was getting married, and they had invited the entire congregation. I overheard people gossiping after service, that a white girl was marrying a Chinaman. An old woman—wearing one of those frumpy fur shawls with a fox’s head and tiny feet dangling from her shoulder—she said she would never come to such a sacrilegious mixing of the races. I guess she didn’t see me standing behind her in the crowded aisle. Sometimes being short has its advantage.

“But me, oh, I was so excited! I had never seen an American wedding. Yes, I had seen so,” and here she would elongate the ‘o’ and spread her arms wide to show the measure, “so many Shinto weddings at the Shrine. Oh, my goodness, so many!” Sometimes, here, she would stop, just for a second, and a fleeting film would veil her eyes, but it came and went quickly.

“It was to be on a Saturday afternoon in June 1953, and there would be food afterwards, so of course your father agreed it would be good to go. You were just three months old, and money was tight because we had just bought this house. How could he pass up a free meal?”

Then she would smile and her eyes would dart mischievously from side to side.

“Your father had a camera, a box camera called a Brownie. He had it in Kyoto when we first met, and he had shown me how to use it, there at Fushimi Inari. It was such a delight—to peek through that little glass hole and pick out only what I wanted to see—to isolate the beautiful from the ordinary—to magically make another world.”

Then she would make a peep-hole with her fingers in front of one eye and turn it toward me, to frame my little face, and we would touch noses again with this mock camera lens between us, giggling the whole time.

“I remembered no matter where we went, he had packed it and moved it along with us. That, and the photos he had taken, stored in shoeboxes up in our closet. So I sneaked into his dresser drawer to see if it was there. Yes! There it was! The red No. 2 Brownie.” She was animated, using her fingers to march like a tiptoeing thief, and giggling. “Oh, I can be sly like the fox!”

“When he came home, I asked if he wanted to take the camera. Maybe he would like a picture. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I think there’s nearly a whole roll of film inside.’”

And she would sigh just a little sigh, because it was such a defining moment, this moment of approval.

“It was a good thing I took that camera, too. The bride—Sarah Cotton—had planned her wedding carefully.” Mother always winked here. “Her family had more money than anyone else in the church, you know—her father was a big shot at Ford. We arrived early because the bus ran only once an hour on Saturday. Poor Sarah was in a tizzy! The photographer was late. No one had a camera. There would be no pictures of the bridesmaids helping her get dressed. When she saw that red Brownie in my hand she squealed with delight.”

“‘Mrs. O’Dale! How perfect! Can you please come back to the choir room and take our picture. I promise to pay you for your trouble. You don’t mind, do you Mr. O’Dale, if I steal your wife for a little while?’ She was so blonde and so beautiful and so American, your father could never have said, ‘No.’”

Mother would stand and put her hands on her hips and prance just a little, in mock sophistication.

“But I shouldn’t make fun. It was the start, my beginning.” Her head would bow with just a little guilt, and she would sit down again. “What could your father do? He couldn’t say, ‘No, it’s my camera. I’ll go and watch you get dressed.’” And we both would laugh at the prospect of Father with all those girls in their fancy lace slips.

“I used the entire roll of film, and then the photographer, her cousin, Brady Kotsin, came. Sarah’s mother gave me a $20 bill—can you imagine! A $20 bill!—and she said, ‘This should cover the cost of development. Can you get a contact print and proofs so we can select what we want for enlargement?’”

Mother’s eyes would widen. Twenty dollars was an enormous amount of money to her. “Your father almost fainted when he saw that $20 bill! Of course, I didn’t know what she was talking about—contact prints and proofs—what were they?”

She soon learned. When the pictures came back from the drugstore, my dad was amazed. They were the best he had seen, he told her. She was a natural.

Sarah’s parents thought so too and paid her handsomely for six enlargements. They recommended her to friends and within a month she had been hired to shoot a small, hurried, unanticipated wedding as the official photographer. Sarah called and advised her to go to Kotsin’s Camera Shop to seek advice. Her uncle owned the shop, and she promised to make the introduction so Mother could get wholesale prices. She suggested that Mother might want to get a new camera to replace that nearly twenty-year-old Brownie.
 

Dad made it clear that he was uncomfortable with all of this, but as long as she accepted only Saturday afternoon weddings and could still manage all of her household duties, he would permit her to carry on. It would be a good hobby for her, and she could make her own spending money.

The following week, at the end of July, Sarah came to the house to take Mother to midtown in her 1951 Mercury Monterey. Dad was outside mowing the lawn when she pulled up.

“My goodness, Mrs. Jin, where’s that new husband of yours? I thought he’d be with you—drivin’ the car—I mean.” He leaned against the grimy wooden handle of his worn-out, two-wheeled reel push-mower and looked perplexed. “Whatever are you drivin’? I thought your father was a Ford man?”

He pulled a big white handkerchief out of his back hip pocket to wipe the sweat from his neck and face, and then scratched the top of his head with the index finger of his left hand.

“Oh, sure he is—certainly. He’s an engineer and works designing engines. In fact, Daddy gave me this car, brand new, when I graduated from Smith two years ago. Look, it’s got this swell Merc-O-Matic transmission. Even a girl can drive it, it’s so easy! And isn’t it pretty? I just love this white top with the turquoise paint and white walled tires. Sets off my blonde hair, don’t you think?”

She was tall and shapely in her red flowered summer dress and straw hat, white ribbons fluttering in the wind, and snappy white cotton gloves, with the animated persona of a Marilyn Monroe as she flirted with Dad.

Self-consciously, he raked his fingers, comb-like, through his hair and stood up a little straighter. Were he not already sunburned, Sarah would have seen him blush as he changed the subject.

“I sure am glad them seventeen-year cicada are gone. I never seen so many bugs in all my life—screechin’ and makin’ such a racket, callin’ their mates to come up out of their dark holes in the ground. They just about ruined your wedding, didn’t they?”

Mother was watching through the screen door and felt a pang of jealousy and fear. There she stood, holding a twenty-week old baby, feeling vulnerable to the mysteries of this still unfamiliar, shocking American culture. She knew that some American husbands had abandoned their Japanese war brides. She believed that most Americans hated her. She had heard of Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, of the geisha Cio-cio-san’s suicide upon relinquishing her haafu child to its American father.

She and my father met halfway on the sidewalk between the house and the street. “We won’t be gone very long, I promise.” She was careful to refrain from revealing her negative feelings in words, lest such a rude assertion undermine her position.

He took me in his arms. “Rosine is coming to baby-sit, ain’t she, Kit?”

“Yes. She’s on her way. Look—there she is, coming now.” Mother pointed across the two yards.

Emerging from her concrete stoop, Rosine, in a red and white gingham sundress, stepped lightly across the sparse patches of emerald green grass and bare black earth, unimpeded by her growing first pregnancy.

As an eighteen-year-old French girl, she was fortunate to have not witnessed the brunt of war, but she knew well the poverty of its aftermath. She had married an Occupation Forces Lieutenant after a hasty courtship that began with the exchange of a pomme d’api for a Hershey bar while he was on R-and-R at the great cathedral of Chartres. Although considerably older than her, he was Catholic, descended from an old Detroit French family, and had gone to Chartres to take Mass and to see the gothic sculpture he had studied in college. She was the last child of eight, half-orphaned, living with her war-widowed mother, and selling stolen fruit at the south transept portal, where, for good luck, she stood beneath the feet of the statue of St. Theodore, a handsome, idealized Christian soldier from the Crusades, his spear and sword readied to conquer and save.

Now she was effervescent in the newness of this land and her promising new life, comfortable with the Catholic community that embraced her, despite some difficulties with her in-laws. She waved and called, “Bonne chance! Good luck!” as Mother walked to the car and Dad passed off his bundle.

Before they drove away, Sarah clasped Mother’s hand and said with a tinge of sarcasm as she rolled her eyes and lifted one eyebrow, “I guess he forgot that Ford makes Mercury. Do you think he would ever approve of a woman driving this car if he knew it had a big V-8 engine?”

Then she continued in her characteristic lively manner.

“My uncle is really looking forward to meeting you, Mrs. O’Dale. He’s seen the enlargements and proofs from the wedding and said that you’re a diamond in the rough. And you know what they say about diamonds? They’re a girl’s best friend!” She hummed a few bars from the song with the same name, from the movie she and her husband had seen a few weeks earlier while on their honeymoon.

They both laughed, and Mother squeezed Sarah’s hand.

“Oh Sarah, you must call me by my first name—Kitsune—or Kit for short. It means fox in English.”

Sarah squinted a bit and peered at her. “Which do you prefer? Everyone gets a nickname, but often it’s not of their choosing. Tell me what you’d like to hear.”

Mother was stunned. No one in America had been so respectful, so accommodating. No one had asked for her opinion.

“I would love to hear ‘Kitsune,’ as my mother and father voiced it.” She paused. “Key-tsoo-nay. Say it that way.”

With a lump in her throat, she could say no more. Her thoughts—“You are a jewel of a friend, like a wish-fulfilled”—could not be spoken for fear that the depth of her true joy would evaporate and disappear as swiftly as the words rolled from tongue to air.

“Yes, I know. . . . .I know,” said Sarah in a rare moment of quiet tenderness.

Although Mother still did not understand exactly what Sarah had meant about the big V-8 engine, she now understood that there was nothing to fear, and her joy resonated into the silence.

By the end of 1953, Dad wanted to withdraw his approval of this hobby. “Kit, this is crazy. You leave every Saturday to go take pictures. It just ain’t right.”

She was a mother; she had no business doing anything but being a full time housewife; and it was his duty to provide for his family. After a careful analysis of the checkbook, he realized that Mother’s income was crucial to making the payments on the 1951 Mercury Monterey he had bought used just a few months earlier from Sarah Jin.

“By golly, I don’t know what possessed me to buy such an expensive used car. I know we needed a car, what with a baby and all. Sarah did make a good point about your being able to drive this model—that you could take the baby to the doctor by yourself and I wouldn’t have to take off work. But now we’re stuck with this payment. It’s more than I can manage. I need more overtime—or a second job.” He seemed incredulous over this dichotomy between his ideals and the real world, a conundrum of his own making.

He sat, bent over the heavy golden oak kitchen table with both elbows planted onto its shiny shellacked surface. His head leaned into the palm of his left hand as his right hand clutched a stack of bills—house mortgage, car loan, electricity.

“What the hell can I do now?”

He sighed, and Mother kept washing the dishes, quietly.

“She did offer me a great deal on it. That ‘49 Plymouth at the used car lot wouldah cost almost as much. Course, she was movin’ to California and didn’t wanna drive the Merc all the way out there. We really did her a favor, takin’ it off her hands.” He was trying hard to justify his decisions and had successfully transferred the blame. “I suppose as long as Rosine can baby-sit on Saturdays, it’ll work out until this car is paid for. Takin’ pictures is a nice hobby, any which way you look at it.”

His disposition improved and he smiled briefly.

“I should pull out that old Brownie and shoot more pictures myself.” After writing the check for the car payment, he looked up again. “Didn’t Sarah just send you a letter and say something about buyin’ a new car?”

“Yes. She sent a Christmas card with a long letter. She bought a 1953 Chevrolet, as I recall,” Mother replied.

“Yeah, I ‘member now—one of those new Corvettes. How could she do that? I mean, be disloyal to her father’s company. You’d think she’d know she owed him that much. I don’t care if that Corvette model is new and sleek and probably faster than anything Ford makes. Doggone fool! That little two-seater piece of shit won’t last five years on the market. She shouldah bought a Ford and kept it in the family.” To his thinking, Sarah was now properly in her place, and he could move on.

By the following June, in 1954, Mother was gone every Saturday for both morning and afternoon wedding shoots. Her clients were amazed at the exquisite coloration of her hand-tinted big portraits, and they speculated that it must be due to her oriental artistic sensibilities. She was sought after and had to refuse some requests in order to comply with her husband’s rules.

She spent her weekday mornings taking formal studio shots of brides in our living room; developing black and white film and making enlargements; hand-tinting the big portraits; putting together albums; and doing the bookkeeping. Afternoons were for housework; hanging laundry-loads of bleached white sheets in the basement next to her darkroom; daily walks to the corner grocery store for fresh red meat; ironing starched blue and white pin-striped coveralls; and, of course, cooking supper before seven. She was breathlessly busy but seemed happy.

“To live means to work. Working is the source of joy,” she would say. “God gives us work to make us happy.”

*****

I’m ashamed to admit little of this mattered to me. I only cared that she always found time to tell me the story about the blue baby bonnet. Her written words were prescient, scribed with such permanence in ink so perfectly formed, flawless in execution, as if she knew I would see them, as if she knew I would come. But, then, she was sly like the fox.

My own sunshine streamers marked a path toward a Tai’an day in July, and here I am anew with the calm of mid-September. In this comforting warm space, this grand vermilion womb of Fushimi Inari’s tunnel of ten thousand torii, I can feel her silent joy embracing me as I recall those pages, where I searched for the other wedding story—the first one.